Introducing The Kno.. a revolutionizing digital textbook | Hacker News Reader

Introducing The Kno.. a revolutionizing digital textbook

kno.com

65 pointsobsaysditto42 comments

My interest is piqued:

As proof of our commitment: from the start we treated our own internal app developers as third party developers. A developer-friendly environment is in our blood. We’re powered by the WebKit browser engine, so if you can build a website, you can build a Kno app.

Also, don't miss the photos on the home page. This thing is enormous.

Engadget has a hands on: http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/02/kno-dual-screen-tablet-ap... (edit)

where do i navigate to physical specs / pictures of people actually using it? those seem suspiciously absent.

Updated my comment with a link for you.

Judging by the size of the device, I'd say that this is likely a good source for the physical specs of the people using it: http://www.bodybuildingpro.com/bestbodybuilderever.html

Seriously, that thing is huge, and is easily larger than anything I needed to carry for an upper-division math class, other than the 'Advanced Engineering Math' course. The book for that was so expensive because it came with sherpas and a mule team. But I digress...

I'd like to see how they avoid the doom of nearly every other attempt at electronic textbooks: publishers that are totally unwilling to distribute their books in electronic form.

Apple and Amazon have enough clout between them with the Kindle and iPad to bring the heavy guns to the negotiating table; the verdict on the Kno remains to be seen.

Judging by the pictures linked above, I think they went too big with it. It's more of a coffee table book than a textbook.

It looks unwieldy, but it does need large pages. I can't tell for sure, but the active area of the screen seems to be comparable in size to my larger textbooks.

Are you trying to learn or surf youtube on the couch?

If they are trying to go application specific for learning I'd rather have a big ass device that kicks ass with textbooks, than suffer a 9" screen.

If you compare it to the text book load of a student now it's a huge improvement.

Also since one of the screens is for note taking, you are also remove that additional stuff as well.

While a device that large seems counter-intuitive, it's made for purpose not general computing.

This device would be amazing for consuming media on the couch. I'm questioning its usability in a typical students day.

Reducing it to 9 inches is taking it to the extreme, even 11 or 12 inch displays would still be perfectly adequate and cut down on it's size and weight.

The kno wins just for the press pics:

http://www.engadget.com/photos/kno-press-pics/#3036339

Everyone's full of envy and all the guys run around in their underwear! Seriously wonder what they were thinking with those pictures.

> from the start we treated our own internal app developers as third party developers

I'm not exactly sure what this means. In the Android/iPhone world, I can see this as meaning no use of private APIs. That gives 3rd party app writers a more even footing in the AppStore at the cost of no API dogfooding whatsoever.

The Kno... revolutionizing digital textbooks with a 5.5 pound, original xbox size, dual screen tablet device that starts just under $1,000.

Shoot me in the face.

Although the price is excessive, I think that we can't forget the target of the device: students. If this tool can improve the student experience, reduce the costs of the books during the year and enable them to do some homework (I haven't tested the system and I have no idea of all the gadgets available)... it might be a good idea for them.

I look back at my Middle School years when I had to carry a bag full of books every day and... 5.5lb doesn't sound that heavy.

Also, this technology has been developed for students. If the device ends up being successful, I am more than sure that other tablets will appear with a broader target.

if i were currently an undergrad, i wouldn't want to pull that thing out in a lecture. i don't know if i could even fit it, given some of the tight seating in the lecture halls i went to. everyone uses a laptop or notepad for note taking and that's about as much space as they can afford. i definitely think they should come out with a smaller form factor.

the other issue is pricing. this device has to significantly beat the price of used textbooks.

It can do things that paper textbooks don't; it isn't competing just on price.

For instance, how about you mark stuff as important which not only lets you flip through just those bits later but it also puts that chunk of information in your automated "review-stuff" queue. Give that queue a "which things to pop-up when" scheduler based on measurements of your retrieval success rate fall-off over time and some memory science, i.e. it can be a textbook that reinforces the important bits just before your brain was about to forget them. You could even reward a regimen of shoving information through the student's attention... "rewrite these notes for extra points."

The size, sure it can be streamlined some, but this isn't for mostly passive content consumption and casual gaming so it should never be iPad sized.

Um, why shouldn't it be iPad sized? I've spent two years looking at memory algorithms, and a similar amount of time implementing and dogfooding learning systems... call it my hobby.

Cro-Mag Rally is way more computationally intensive than anything I've worked with or seen. Perhaps more importantly, the more intricate scheduling systems don't perform any better than the simpler systems.

The real key to making any sort of repetitive study system work isn't really in the scheduling algorithm -- it's in making the system easy to use and always available.

If it's a lot of work to get information into or out of a spaced repetition system, then you won't use it. If you can't study whenever you've got a spare five minutes, then you won't use it. If you can't hit it from your desktop, iPad, Motorola Droid, iPhone, laptop, and computer in the library, then you won't use it. Because it's inconvenient.

So please, bring on the iPad learning systems. It's portable, lightweight, and can speak WiFi and 3G. Anything that makes studying more convenient is good.

Very good point on the need for a repetitive study system to be always available.

The bit about iPad being too small comes from asking something like "why aren't textbooks the size of fictional paperbacks?" I suppose it could be just historical accident or the need for enough page mass that the book lays flat and open. But seems to me that the answer also includes something along the lines of different types of information being better shown at different sizes, with richer learning material needing more room. When the target users already carry a bag all the time, should portability of a textbook replacement be so overriding a concern that the area for showing and writing information is slashed by something like half (iPad screen to college notebook ratio) up front? Shouldn't form follow function a little more than that?

The really old college textbooks (1950's and earlier) I have are actually smaller than modern versions, with text areas comparable or smaller than an iPad screen. So perhaps the question can be reformulated as "why did textbooks get bigger over the past century?" Or maybe there is just a lot less reasoning behind their sizes than I'm presupposing.

My guess has more to do with sales and marketing than anything else. I've got more than a few textbooks from the 50's and 60's on a variety of subjects, and for the most part, they are a joy to read, because they assume the reader is intelligent enough to not try and eat the chalkboard erasers.

Big textbooks, with lots of diagrams, pictures, and colors, look impressive. They give the impression of a tome filled with knowledge and wisdom, whether or not they actually are. Which is why school districts and professors in charge of lower-division courses buy the damn things -- they get impressive-looking textbooks to wow the students and parents, and they don't have to think much about the choice.

It's just good marketing.

Tablets are going to expose all sorts of new ways of interacting with hypertext on the client side. Supporting html5 is nice for authors, but the real revolution comes when readers can compare multiple hypertext documents, naturally browse through interlinked documents, make annotations, etc. These things have been tried and failed on other form factors, but I think they might succeed on a device like this, Courier or the iPad where the new form-factor requires new interaction models anyway.

This device doesn't look perfect, but they're exploring the most interesting aspect of the tablet problem.

Check out Popplet. I think something like this could be used as a framework to enable most of the functionality shown in Microsoft's Courier vaporware video. (But in a multi-touch friendly way)

http://popplet.com/

If other applications could be integrated, such that arbitrary docs could appear in a Popplet-window, then this gives us a task/document-centric way for users to integrate and organize all of their data. (Such that applications disappear into the background, and it's their data that matters.)

Very neat, thanks for sharing that. If data from other application could be integrated like that, would that get it kicked off the iPad under the new "no new 'desktop' environments" rule?

Make you own Kno. You will need:

- 2 x Apple iPad

- 1 x Hinge

not entirely true, although i think you are being a little facetious. this device seems a lot more open in general (use of flash for example).

He may be acting a bit facetious but as someone who really doesn't see the point of an ipad at this point in time 2 ipads seems like a much better deal than this hunk of hardware.

It's a textbook. Flash doesn't matter. The content needs to be there. I've read textbooks on my iPad before; for the most part, it works OK. There doesn't appear to be any big advantage to the Kno that couldn't be matched in a specialized iPad app.

Reminds me of this competition for brand names worse than Knol:

http://voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/08/50-for-worse-brand-n...

This was originally branded the Kakai.

http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/01/20/chegg-founders-stea...

www.kakai.com now redirects to www.kno.com

It is a project by the Founder of Chegg.com a service that specializes in textbook rentals.

I'm not really enticed by any of their branding.

Yes! I've been waiting for an ebook reader that I can use to take hand-written notes with.

I really can't concentrate on a book unless I have a pencil in hand, underlining, circling, and taking notes. Stylus instead of pencil, here.

Having just researched Personal Learning Environments (PLE's) [1] - this is a timely reminder of just how bad standard teaching portal type application are for the goal of teaching and learning. Hopefully this will spawn a few imitators which will drive the costs down so that it isn't just useful in the US.

[1]http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.97....

Drop the hardware, write an iPad app. They do some very cool things with the software that neither the kindle nor Apples book reader app satisfies. But when it comes down to how to spend the money, $1000 on one Kno or two iPads, there isn't enough of a value add on for the Kno. In fact, the iPad has more features and a better form factor.

Kno is about a year late for their hardware, but their software could work as an iPad app.

So basically, it's a tablet, but it's as unpractical to use as a laptop. (If you can use it comfortably somewhere, you can probably use a laptop instead.)

I would want one of these if there were enough textbooks and the price was reasonable.

An approximate equivalent would be a tablet/laptop and a paper notebook and pen.

It looks cool but it's massive and with two screens that size and the batteries that would be required to support them, I can imagine that it is very heavy.

Which is definitely one of the biggest problems with paper textbooks, something we should try and get away from with etextbooks.

5.5 lbs! (from http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/technologybrierdudleys... )

and at the price point mentioned in article, I feel it is a non-starter.

What if someone published a textbook through the Kindle store? This would be available through the iPad, which either has or will grow into a lot of the same features.

It doesn't really feel like the kindle has the level of formatting required to really do a textbook.

Note taking where you can just scribble on the page is critical. Problem with the iPad is the lack of a stylus (you can't really write with your finger or type in the way people take notes...)

Funny, but I use a stylus with it.

It'd probably weigh about the same amount as a first year Calc textbook. This is actually one area where the standard for improvement isn't very high. Textbooks weigh A LOT, and I think it's getting to the point where people's posture and backs are being negatively affected. Let alone the day you need to move...

Compared to something like an iPad, this Kno is going to be a hell of a lot heavier, so it's just a matter of what the students are comparing against.

This is all moot though as the major pain point with textbooks are their obscene pricing. If this is just the same old overpriced textbooks, just in digital form, it's interesting but hardly a game changer.

Yeah, but its also really nice to have a decent sized screen when actually trying to read and think.

I'm sure that it will make books cheaper, as it will remove much of the distribution overhead, but the fact remains that writing a text book is extremely time consuming, and the market is small, so the only way for authors to get any sort of reasonable compensation is to make the books cost a lot.

The sticking point with text books IS the printing. My wife (PhD and professor) would love to move to digital text books. In the digital realm there are actually entire text books that aren't widely available in print. They are also MUCH cheaper for the students.

http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/ is one example. There are others I can't remember right now.

This device seems to knock down a LOT of barriers. The two screens allow for the space needed to show all of the content a professor might Believe it or not, THE biggest thing slowing adoption of electronic text books is the ability to take notes want to expose at once. The students can take notes on the pages (this is a huge deal for adoption believe it or not). It enables open and cheaper options...

I like it a lot. I think they have a winner if they've executed well.

Looks hackernews-inspired: two iPads and some Sugru to hold them together.

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